← All chart types
flow family
sankey
Flow between sources and destinations with band widths proportional to volume.
Energy budgets, capital flows, customer journeys. The width of each ribbon encodes the flow size; the eye traces sources rightward to destinations and reads conservation.
When to use
Showing how a quantity divides and merges across stages, with volumes you want quantified.
When NOT to use
There is no preserved quantity (use flow-diagram), or it is just a sequence (use timeline).
Rhetorical roles
- flow
- decompose
Variants & related
Required primitives
- has_data_labels
- has_legend
Optional primitives
- has_source_note
Common anti-patterns
- rainbow-palette
- overcrowded
Disambiguation rules
- Band widths are PROPORTIONAL to flow volume — this is the sankey signature.
- If arrows are illustrative (no preserved volume), it is flow-diagram (often should_be_kind=diagram).